Oracle Blog

Markus Flierl's Weblog

Crossbow beta

After several months of the whole team burning midnight oil and working through weekends the Crossbow beta bits have been officially released today at noon! Of course everyone is very excited about that! There are 15 customers lined up who are interested in running Crossbow bits.

The even more interesting part is that there is a software company in New York called Reliant Security that is running our bits in production to improve Payment Card Data Security for Merchants who are required to meet challenging PCI Data Security requirements:

Reliant's Managed PCI System ("MPS") is a cost-effective solution for implementing PCI controls in remote merchant locations such as stores. Implementing PCI data security controls in store systems is a source of frustration for many merchants. New store systems requirements, including wireless networks, productivity applications, Voice over IP and guest access are falling into the scope of PCI, while security controls around these technologies have tightened. Traditional solutions for PCI compliance require complex and expensive integration of proprietary devices and software. MPS replaces complex multi-vendor security and networking solutions with a single low-cost appliance to meet PCI and store systems requirements in an integrated solution.

Separately, Reliant and Sun confirmed the production rollout of MPS, including Crossbow components, across a 750-store specialty retail chain. With the support of the OpenSolaris Community, Reliant has been able meet a very aggressive production rollout schedule while maintaining the stability and cost-effectiveness of the solution in a demanding production environment.

Crossbow provides the building blocks for network virtualization and resource control by virtualizing the stack and NIC around any service (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, NFS, etc.), protocol or Virtual machine. Each virtual stack can be assigned its own priority and bandwidth on a shared NIC without causing any performance degradation. Crossbow is the next step in the evolution of Solaris networking stack and brings bandwidth resource control and virtualization as part of the architecture itself instead of the usual add-on layers which have heavy overheads and complexity.

"It was the leading-edge network virtualization features that drew us to OpenSolaris." said Richard Newman, Managing Partner of Reliant Security. "OpenSolaris provides the right balance of cost, functionality and resource utilization. Crossbow enables virtual network devices that allow us to allocate virtualized IP stacks and deliver QoS within our solution."

Before going open source with Solaris Reliant Security wouldn't even have know about Project Crossbow until it's official release. With OpenSolaris Reliant Security was able to not only plan for the release of Project Crossbow, but to use it in production this early in the development process. Through the mailing lists on OpenSolaris.org our engineers can directly communicate with their engineers, get early feedback on our features and find out about defects. It's a win-win situation.